Since Russia’s decision to militarily intervene into Ukraine, a darkness that had long remained in the shadows has been brought to the surface. This darkness took the form of an intention that could no longer hide behind the veneer of “plausible deniability” or self-congratulatory devotees of a ‘liberal rules-based international order’ that has been repeatedly blared like a broken record onto the world since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992.

Rather than continuing to play by the rules of those who wish all evidence to militarily contain Russia with a NATO-controlled Ballistic Missile Shield targeting Russian defenses, it was decided that a new approach was needed and the game was called out.

Was it the evidence of the bioweapons facilities in Ukraine long treated as conspiracy theory, though now admitted to having existed by Victoria Nuland as the straw that broke the camel’s back? Was it the evidence of an immanent assault led by neo-Nazi forces onto Donbass and Crimea that had been the deciding factor? Some speculate that it was Zelensky’s February 19 call for Ukraine to break the 1994 Budapest Treaty and adopt nuclear weapons.

In truth, we may never know the specific cause of Putin’s decision, but one this is sure.

A war was NOT begun on February 24 2022. The war against Russia was actually launched on February 22, 2014 when the USA finalized its regime change on the democratically elected government of Victor Yanukovych and began what some have termed a slow-motion Operation Barbarossa over a prolonged 8-year period with one objective in mind: The total destruction and subjugation of the Russian Federation as outlined in Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard in 1997.

With the shadow creatures having been forced to the surface, it has become increasingly clear that the virtuous image projected by the western alliance is anything but peaceful, or democratic. Rather than capturing the many obvious opportunities to resolve the crisis diplomatically over the past eight years, the USA, UK, and Kiev have instead chosen only the path of sabotage, slander, and economic war via unilateral sanctions.

So what is to be done?

I honestly don’t know if today’s USA is too far gone for its better constitutional foreign policy traditions to be revived, but I do know that if this history continues to remain buried as it has for the past several generations, then any small chance to save the republic and preserve world peace will certainly be destroyed.

The Strategic Significance of 1776 on International Affairs

Although many have been fed the myth that the USA was a nation bred for global imperial ambitions at its birth, the truth is far different. Certainly, it was never a utopic bastion of liberty untainted by hypocrisy or corruption that some romantic historians have painted over years, but inversely it was never a unidimensional evil slaveocracy as cynical Critical Race Theoreticians maintain. The USA should rather be understood as an unfinished symphony of sorts, whose practical performance too often fell far short than its sound constitutional ideals.

For starters, it is important to appreciate the fact that America’s founding documents (the 1776 Declaration of Independence, and 1787 Constitution) were the first examples in history of a form of government premised on the idea that all people were made equal, endowed with inalienable rights with no mention for race, creed, gender or class. Additionally, the notion that the legitimacy of a nation’s laws arose from the consent of the governed, and mandated to support the general welfare both in the present and long into posterity, was a profound break from the previous notions of Hobbesian law of ‘might makes right’ that had governed hereditary institutions for eons.

The practical expression of these principles to foreign policy were discussed at length by President Washington who warned the young nation of avoiding the dual evils of foreign entanglements externally and party politics domestically when he asked his fellow citizens during his outgoing address of 1796:

“Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humour or caprice?”

President Washington painted by Gilbert Stuart featuring his right hand resting on the Constitution

During this speech, Washington explained that IF the USA were to survive, it would be due to an international policy of “extending our commercial relations, to have with them [foreign nations] as little political connection as possible.”

Some have slandered Washington’s call for reduced political enmeshment with other nations as isolationist, but he always promoted international commerce driven by mutual benefit. It was merely imperial operations, intrigue, deceit and the new age of color revolutions starting with the Jacobin Terror during Washington’s presidency which the great leader saw as an poisonous mess that would destroy the young republic if it became enmired in foreign escapades.

John Quincy Adams and the Anti-Imperial Origins of the Monroe Doctrine

John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) extended these ideas further still by drafting the Monroe Doctrine during his stint as Secretary of State from 1817-1825 which he knew could only work if America ventures “not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy”.

President John Quincy Adams with his hand resting on a sketch of Washington

That is to say, as long as the USA focused her efforts on fixing her own problems with a focus on internal improvements, then the Monroe Doctrine would be a blessing for both herself and the international community.

John Quincy Adams also understood the danger of the growing British-run fifth column inside of the heart of the USA then centered around the Federalist Party. While serving as U.S. Ambassador to Russia, Adams wrote to his mother in 1811 (just as Napoleon was preparing his Russian invasion and as Britain were on the verge of a new war against the USA):

“If that Party [the Federalist Junto of New England] are not effectually put down in Massachusetts, as completely as they already are in New York, and Pennsylvania, and all the southern and western states, the Union is gone. Instead of a nation, coextensive with the North American continent, destined by God and nature to be the populous and most powerful people ever combined under one social compact, we shall have an endless multitude of little insignificant clans and tribes at eternal war with one another for a rock, or a fish pond, the sport and fable of European masters and oppressors.” (1)

John Quincy Adams firmly understood the world historic significance of the American revolution not as a geographical phenomenon among 13 isolated British colonies, but potentially as the spark of a new paradigm for all humanity liberated from hereditary institutions. At the turn of the 19^th century, there were still French, British, Spanish and Russian imperial interests which all had ambitions to gain control of the territories of the Americas forcing the Hobbesian paradigm of war and intrigue into the new world. In the mind of Adams, as all great American patriots, this had to be stopped.

During the July 4 celebrations in 1821, Adams noted that the Declaration of Independence “was the first solemn declaration by a nation of the only LEGITIMATE foundation of civil government. It was the corner stone of a new fabric, destined to cover the surface of the globe. It demolished at a stroke the lawfulness of all governments founded upon conquest. It swept away all the rubbish of accumulated centuries of servitude. It announced in practical form to the world the transcendent truth of the unalienable sovereignty of the people.”

Did Adams believe that “destined to cover the surface of the globe” meant that the USA was destined to become a Pax Americana subduing the weak to her hegemony? Not at all.

On January 23, 1822 Adams wrote that colonial institutions “are incompatible with the essential character of our institutions.” He also said that “great colonial establishments are engines of wrong, and that in the progress of social improvement it will be the duty of the human family to abolish them, as they are now endeavoring to abolish the slave trade.”

Adams understood the importance of seeing the world as “a community of principle” where win-win cooperation based upon the self-improvement of all parts and the whole international community as more than the mere sum of parts, would constantly bring renewal and creative vitality to diplomacy. It was a top-down systemic approach to policy that saw economics, security and political affairs interwoven into one unified system. This is an integrative way of thinking that has been sorely lost in the hyper theoretical, compartmentalized mode of zero-sum thinking dominant in today’s neo-liberal think tank complex.

It was for this reason, that Adams advocated the use of Hamiltonian national banking and large-scale infrastructure projects like the Erie Canal and railways throughout his years as Secretary of State and President. IF this system were the causal force behind the growth of American interests across the continent or the world more broadly, it would not be through brute force, but rather by the uplifting of standards of living of all parties.

Adams, Lincoln and National Banking

Working with a young protégé named Abraham Lincoln, Adams fought tooth and nail against the Spanish-American War of 1846 which saw a deep abuse of his Monroe Doctrine.

Both a young Lincoln and John Quincy Adams had earlier organized to get Whig leader William Harrison (1773-1841) elected president in 1841 with a focus on reviving Hamilton’s national bank which had earlier been killed by President Andrew Jackson to great damage to the economic sovereignty of the USA itself.

Although this ugly chapter of history has been scrubbed from the popular records, the operation to kill the second National Bank in 1832 resulted in a total collapse of all public works in order to pay the national debts using a technique not that different from the IMF demands for austerity on debtor nations in our modern era. Credit was to farmers and entrepreneurs dried up, speculation ran rampant, thousands of local currencies (many counterfeit) ran rampant, and the growth of slave-picked cotton took over the production of the nation’s productivity like a cancer.

Sadly even though legislation to revive a national bank had passed both Houses of Congress and only awaited the signature of President Harrison, his mysterious death after only three months in office put an end to that dream.

The best elements of the Whig party regrouped to form the anti-slavery republican party in 1856 after the second Whig president Zachary Taylor also died of poisoning in 1851 after only 2 years in office.

Abraham Lincoln Arises

Out of this small grouping of nationalists struggling to preserve the Union, Abraham Lincoln emerged with a concise plan to revive national banking, protectionism and a security policy founded upon the Monroe Doctrine. Describing the terms of the oncoming civil war from a global strategic perspective, Lincoln debated the pro-slavery candidate Judge Stephen Douglass in 1858 saying:

“That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles – right and wrong – throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings.”

We all know essentials of the Civil War, but we may not appreciate the success of that conflict depending upon Lincoln’s activation of state banking via the issuance of greenbacks and 5-20 bonds that by-passed private financiers demanding usurious interest rates. These productive bonds and greenbacks also funded the execution of the war at the same time as they funded great infrastructure projects like the Trans Continental railway uniting the continent.

Lincoln found like-minded reformers in Russia whose new Czar Alexander II was intent on carving out the rot of oligarchism, serfdom and underdevelopment that had subverted Russian potential for far too long. To this end, Alexander II liberated over 25 million serfs, began sweeping anti-corruption reforms and overhauled the finances of his nation with a focus on industrial development in tandem with the United States. The czar’s decision to send a fleet of Russian naval ships to the eastern and western coasts of the USA as a message to the British and French imperialists to stay out of the war gave Lincoln a decisive edge he needed to end the secession and preserve the union.

Sadly, this victory did not play on either the national or international scale as it should have. Not only was reconstruction soon thwarted with a newly re-organized slaveocracy creating a new program of “share cropping” that pulled newly freed blacks into a new master-slave dependency, but Lincoln’s greenbacks were soon taken out of circulation under Anglophile puppet presidents. With the 1876 Specie Resumption Act, tying the U.S. dollar to a one-to-one parity with gold, internal improvements seized up, credit to industry evaporated, speculation began to run rampant once more and bank panics began to periodically wreak havoc on the nation’s stability.

With the assassinations of Lincoln, President Garfield, and Alexander II between 1865 to 1881, a mad effort to put the Constitutional genie back into the bottle as the fifth column operations within Boston and Manhattan pushed increasingly for a new imperial foreign policy modelled on the British Empire.

William McKinley Revives the American System

The last major 19^th century effort to break this traitorous network took the form of President William McKinley’s emergence into the White House in 1897. Once again, a program of national planning, protective tariffs, industrial growth both at home and abroad became the characteristic shaping U.S. domestic and foreign policy. Describing his understanding of the historic current that he was stepping into, McKinley eulogized both Lincoln and Washington in 1895 saying:

“The greatest names in American history are Washington and Lincoln. One is forever associated with the independence of the States and formation of the Federal Union; the other with universal freedom and the preservation of the Union. Washington enforced the Declaration of Independence as against England; Lincoln proclaimed its fulfillment not only to a downtrodden race in America, but to all people for all time who may seek the protection of our flag. These illustrious men achieved grander results for mankind within a single century, from 1775 to 1865, than any other men ever accomplished in all the years since first the flight of time began.”

Although he was sucked into an unjust war in the Philippines by Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt (the story told here), McKinley fought consistently to defend the Monroe Doctrine by giving full U.S. support to the industrial growth of North, South and Central America. Internationally, McKinley fought to keep the USA out of the carving up of China in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion and worked closely with international co-thinkers like Russia’s Count Sergei Witte and France’s Gabriel Hanotaux to advance rail development and peace treaties across Eurasia. Had such programs not been sabotaged by murder, coups and regime change operations, then it is certain that the train wreck of World War One and its sequel would never have been possible.

Sadly, after McKinley was assassinated, Teddy Roosevelt’s “big stick” diplomacy launched a new 20^th century trend that saw the USA extending its hegemony over weak states rather than keeping out foreign imperial intrigue as Adams had envisioned.

Assassination of President William McKinley by Leon Czolgosz at Pan-American Exposition reception on Sept. 6, 1901. (BY AMERICAN PAINTER T. DART WALKER, 1905/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

FDR and Wallace Attempt to Revive a Sane American Foreign Policy

Since 1901, we have seen small but significant attempts to revive Adams’ overarching security doctrine.

We saw it come alive again with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s program for internationalizing the New Deal across China, India, Ibero America, the Middle East, Africa and Russia. FDR’s Vice President Henry Wallace laid out the terms of this international New Deal in his 1943 book “The Century of the Common Man” laid out this vision for the post-war world saying:

“The new democracy by definition abhors imperialism. But by definition also, it is internationally minded and supremely interested in raising the productivity, and therefore the standard of living, of all the peoples of the world. First comes transportation and this is followed by improved agriculture, industrialization, and rural elecrification…. As Molotov so clearly indicated, this brave, free world of the future can not be created by the United States and Russia alone. Undoubtedly China will have a strong influence on the world which will come out of the war and in exerting this influence it is quite possible that the principles of Sun Yat Sen will prove to be as significant as those of any other modern statesman.”

Sadly after FDR’s untimely death on April 12, 1945, the Anglo-American special relationship was again revived and all international New Dealers were quickly purged from all positions of influence. Despite an Orwellian age of anti-Russian hysteria then taking hold, Henry Wallace still maintained some influence in the U.S. government (although having been downgraded to Secretary of Commerce under President Harry Truman).

In the September 12, 1946 speech that got him fired, Wallace clearly laid out the two paths forward for the USA:

“Make no mistake about it—the British imperialistic policy in the Near East alone, combined with Russian retaliation, would lead the United States straight to war…

“… It is essential that we look abroad through our own eyes and not through the eyes of either the British Foreign Office or a pro-British or anti-Russian press…. The tougher we get, the tougher they get.

“I believe that we can get cooperation once Russia understands that our primary objective is neither saving the British Empire nor purchasing oil in the near East with the lives of American soldiers. We cannot let national oil rivalries force us into a war….”

Eisenhower to Kennedy: The Battle for the Soul of America Continued

Eisenhower made some positive moves towards this renewal by ending the Korean War and attempting his Crusade for Peace driven by U.S.-Russian cooperation and advanced scientific investments into India, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Latin America. Eisenhower’s many positive plans were sadly derailed by a growing parasite in the heart of the U.S. deep state which he addressed in his famous “military industrial complex” speech of 1960.

Kennedy’s efforts to extract the U.S. military from Vietnam, revive FDR’s New Deal spirit in the 1960s, while seeking entente with Russia was another noble effort to bring back Adams’ security doctrine, but his early death soon put an end to this orientation.

From 1963 to 2016, tiny piecemeal efforts to revive a sane security doctrine proved short-lived and were often undone by the more powerful pressures of unipolarist intrigue that sought nothing less than full Anglo-American hegemony in the form of a New World Order whose arrival was celebrated by the likes of Bush Sr and Kissinger in 1992.

‘America First’ Revives a Sane Security Doctrine

Despite his many limitations, President Trump did make an effort to restore a sane security doctrine by focusing American interests on healing from 50+ years of self-inflicted atrophy under globalized outsourcing, militarism and post-industrialism.

Despite having to contend with an embarrassingly large and independent military-intelligence industrial complex that didn’t get less powerful after Kennedy’s murder, Trump announced the terms of his international outlook in April 2019 saying:

“Between Russia, China and us, we’re all making hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons, including nuclear, which is ridiculous.… I think it’s much better if we all got together and didn’t make these weapons … those three countries I think can come together and stop the spending and spend on things that are more productive toward long-term peace.”

This call for a U.S.-Russia-China cooperative policy ran in tandem with the first phase of the U.S.-China Trade deal which went into effect in January 2020 guaranteeing $350 billion of U.S. finished goods purchased by China. None other than Soros himself suffered a public meltdown that month when he announced that the two greatest threats to his global open society were 1) Trump’s USA and 2) Xi’s China.

Of course, a pandemic derailed much of this momentum and the trade deal slowly broke apart. Despite these failures, the idea of returning the USA to an “American first” outlook by cleaning up its own internal messes, extracting CIA operations from the military, cutting the USA out of the Big Pharma-led World Health Organization, defunded regime change organizations like NED abroad and returning to a traditionally American policy of protective tariffs were all extremely important initiatives that Trump put into motion, and set a precedent which must be capitalized upon by nationalist forces from all parties wishing to save their republic from an oncoming calamity.

America’s Slide into Self-Destruction

One year into Biden’s “rules based international order”, the hope for stability and peaceful cooperation among the nations of the earth has been seriously undermined. Unlike Trump, who rightfully severed U.S. cooperation with NATO, the current neo-con heavy administration has made absorbing Ukraine and other former Soviet States into NATO a high priority going so far as to infuse private mercenary forces, and Al-Qaeda-affiliated fighters from Syria into Ukraine to fight the Russians. To this dangerous policy we have also seen billions of dollars of lethal weapons sent into a neo-Nazi infested Ukrainian military with confused untrained citizens from Ukraine being told to fight and die for a cause that even western geopoliticians admit they cannot win.

Today’s USA has committed to a full-scale policy of self-destruction both on economic and military levels promoting a war which risks escalating out of control into a thermonuclear exchange both against Russia and also China.

When looking at Russian demands for security guarantees from this standpoint and holding in mind the new form of a Eurasian Manifest Destiny emerging with Putin’s Far Eastern Vision, Polar Silk Road and China’s Belt and Road Initiative, it is a rich irony that the spirit of John Quincy Adams’ security doctrine is alive in the world. Just not in the USA.

The author can be reached at matthewehret.substack.com

(1) Samuel Flagg Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Foundation of American Foreign Policy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950).

The Biden administration and the mainstream media are trumpeting a Russian effort to create allies in Latin America, America’s backyard.  This is part of the U.S. propaganda campaign against Moscow.  Last week, the press spokesman for the Department of State (DoS), Ned Price, gratuitously invoked the Monroe Doctrine against Russian involvement in Latin America, warning that the United States would “respond swiftly and decisively.”  In so doing, Price inadvertently and implicitly begged the question of how Russian President Vladimir Putin’s defense of its western border differs from U.S. hegemony in the Western Hemisphere.

First, some particulars.  The mainstream media, particularly the New York Times and the Washington Post, are exaggerating Russian diplomatic efforts in South America, describing normal diplomatic activity as a frenzied campaign to increase influence in Washington’s backyard.  In the only evidence theTimes could produce, the article said that Putin “spoke” to Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega for the first time since 2014; “called” the leaders of Cuba and Venezuela; “hosted” the president of Argentina; and “scheduled” a meeting with Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro.  The Times concluded that these contacts were proof of Putin’s efforts to “build on ties that go back to the Cold War and shed light on the global nature of his ambitions.”  Total boilerplate!!

A day later, the Post—playing catch-up—castigated Bolsonaro for bringing “Latin America’s largest and most powerful country into an embrace with one of the United States’ greatest foreign adversaries.”  Like the Times, the Post maligned Putin’s “gambit to forge stronger relationships in Latin America, far from Russia’s traditional sphere of influence.”  The Post concluded that Putin was successfully “outflanking the West’s attempts to isolate his country.”  U.S. officials have contributed to this propaganda campaign with charges of Russian online influence operations to sow unrest in South America.  Again, no evidence was produced.

In distorting normal diplomatic activity that presented no threat to the United States, the mainstream media was carrying propaganda water for the Biden administration.  But there was one newsworthy aspect of this activity as a result of the Times’ efforts to create out of whole cloth the possibility of Putin taking the opportunity to provide “military support” or deploy “weapons in the region.”  The Times falsely linked Putin’s personal diplomacy to the possibility of putting “military infrastructure” in Venezuela or Cuba.  No evidence of such activity was offered; there is none and Latin American analysts pooh-poohed the notion of Russia deploying weapons across the region.

Nevertheless, this conjecture came up in a DoS press conference and Price, instead of dodging the issue, threatened a swift and decisive U.S. response.  In so doing, he opened the door to a discussion of whether Putin had legitimate reasons for wanted to control the deployment of modern Western weaponry, including a sophisticated air defense system in Poland and Romania, where there are U.S. bases.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken begged some questions of his own on February 18, when he spoke to the United Nations about the evidence of Russian invasion plans. Senior European officials have expressed frustration with Blinken’s remarks because he didn’t share specific intelligence, let alone sources and methods.  After all, it was nearly 20 years ago—February 2003—when another secretary of state, Colin Powell, made a case for war against Iraq by offering two dozen false allegations regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.  Powell purposely placed two leading U.S. intelligence officials behind him—Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte and CIA director George Tenet, who played major roles in the politicization of intelligence regarding Iraq. Presumably Blinken and CIA director William Burns, the former deputy secretary of state, remember the setback to U.S. credibility from the politicization of intelligence and the deceitful speech from a once respected American official.

I’ve never been sure about the lessons of history, but since we only have the history of the past to go on, it may be a good time to reprise U.S. historical responses to foreign intervention in the Western Hemisphere.  The Cuban missile crisis is well known to most.  Less well known is the German campaign in 1916-1917 to entice the Mexican government into a war with the United States.  German Foreign Secretary Alfred Zimmermann sent his telegram to Mexico with the assistance of the American embassy in Berlin because of Britain’s control of cable traffic in Europe.  The “Zimmermann telegram” became a major element In President Woodrow Wilson’s address to a special session of Congress in April 1917 to demand a declaration of war.

Before we mindlessly expanded NATO twenty-five years ago, it would have been helpful if the Clinton administration had remembered the history of the Monroe Doctrine as well as the history of Russian and Soviet efforts to safeguard their sensitive borders in the European theatre and Central Asia.  Ironically, the Cold War began to recede in the early 1980s when the United States deployed Pershing-II and cruise missiles in Europe, but the Soviets responded with diplomacy rather than deployments of their own.  The short time-to-target Pershing II presented a serious vulnerability problem for Soviet strategic forces and its early warning systems.

The United States (and the world) were lucky that a Soviet leadership—not only Mikhail Gorbachev but Yuri Andropov as well—realized the need to end the missile race in Europe, and accept an arms control treaty that eliminated intermediate-range missiles in the European theatre.  The Kremlin could have added to their own SS-20 force of intermediate-range missiles, but they chose not to.  The INF Treaty to eliminate intermediate-range missiles led to the resignations of two important Cold Warriors, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle.

Conversely, the deployment of Western weaponry in East Europe has created the conditions for a renewed Cold War between the United States and Russia.  Putin has responsibility for encircling a defenseless Ukraine with unthinkable force, but the United States is responsible for repudiating an understanding in 1990 to resist deploying military force in East Europe and expanding a NATO organization with former members of the Warsaw Pact as well as former Soviet republics.  We believe that Putin is seeking to undo the European security order with his policy of military coercion.  The Russians believe that we destroyed the European security order with the expansion of NATO, which threatens to place the fifth NATO state on Russia’s border.

If war ensues, there will be a great deal of blame to assign to both sides.  Like World War I, no one really wants war in Europe, but no statesman has emerged to invoke diplomacy to maintain the peace.

counterpunch.org

China is rapidly surpassing the United States as the most influential nation across Latin America, in the U.S.’s own backyard. This is not a boast by the Chinese government. It is the considered assessment of the five star admiral who heads U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) in his testimony on March 16 to the SenatUe Armed Services Committee.

For almost 200 years since President James Monroe first adumbrated it in a regular message to Congress in December 1823, successive generations of U.S. policymakers and the American people have taken it for granted that the entire vast continent of South America, as well as giant Mexico, the small and much-put-upon nations of Central American and the Caribbean have been and should always remain the United States’ backyard, with all the supposedly evil and repressive powers of the Old World kept out of them — in the sacred names, of course, of Democracy, Freedom and Free Trade.

In fact, with the exception of a handful all too brief eras of genuine shining idealism and goodwill under Presidents Ulysses S. Grant (1869-77), Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-45) and John F. Kennedy (1961-63), U.S. domination of the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Western Hemisphere has been characterized, not by benign neglect but rather by a monstrously malign attention.

The repressions and depredations that President Porfirio Diaz, with the enthusiastic support of Wall Street and the City of London inflicted on the Mexican people during his 35 year reign of terror from 1876 to 1911 now known as the Porfiriato defy belief: Almost 10 million peasants were driven off their land and national life expectancy crashed to only 30 years when it was 50 in the neighboring United States. At the same time, $1.5 billion in U.S. business investment (and these were 19th century dollars) flooded in.

A new era of holier-than-thou heavy-handed intervention came with America’s first systematically imperialist President Theodore Roosevelt. TR was a ludicrous joke as a soldier and military leader. He charged up San Juan Hill in Cuba in 1898 managing to avoid getting himself shot and then in the first years of World War I endlessly tried to embrace the United States in World War I from almost the start: He imagined that a San Juan Hill-style cavalry charge across the Western Front would break the German Army. Had he had his way, 2 million American boys would have been plowed under to fertilize the fields of Belgium and Northern France — for nothing.

But in the Western Hemisphere, TR was far more effective: He waged shameless aggression against the nation of Columbia carving out an entire secessionist state from it so that the United States could build and control the Panama Canal — an essential step on America’s rise to global sea power. And the first Roosevelt also established the dark 20th century precedent that the nations of Central and South America needed the guiding hand of U.S. imperialism to whip them (literally) into shape. He dignified this policy of aggression and imperial exploitation with the title “The Roosevelt Corollary.”

Woodrow Wilson, an ugly anti-African-American racist of the most deep and implacable nature, initiated a new era of catastrophic interventions in the hemisphere, first in Mexico and then across the Caribbean region as well. This state of affairs continued through the 1920s.

The now revered and deified President Dwight D. Eisenhower knowingly approved an open CIA war to topple the genuine democracy of President Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954: It was an international crime that unleashed far worse — a generations-long Dark Age of genocide, mass rape and the slaughter and enslavement of children against the ancient Mayan peoples of the entire region. The late Irish political philosopher Conor Cruise O’Brien, before he became a neocon in his dotage, strikingly commented that continuing U.S. repression and crimes against humanity across Central America far exceeded anything the Soviet Union inflicted in establishing its security zone of friendly states in Central Europe after World War II.

President George Herbert Walker Bush’s no-nonsense toppling of the corrupt and genuine ugly but also small time thug Manuel Noriega set the tone for the generations since: The name Bush approved for the invasion “Operation Just Cause” perfectly reflected the combination of total, confident and unhesitating self-righteousness and instinctive readiness to ignore all standards of international law and fair play that successive U.S. leaders and policymakers have always felt about invading and toppling any government they like across Latin America.

However, all that was the story of the 19th and 20th centuries and already in this still young 21st century, things are finally changing at last: Overlooked in the entire U.S. Mainstream Media (MSM) SOUTHCOM chief Admiral Craig Feller’s honest, blunt and outspoken message to the Senate Armed Services Committee made this vividly clear. (Though in my long experience, almost all of the senators who heard it will have forgotten everything the admiral said after their three or four post-hearing martinis.)

One can certainly disagree with the tone of Admiral Fuller’s comments which focused on the advances and alleged iniquities of Russia and China rather than the ongoing disastrous bipartisan policies that that the George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and now Joe Biden administrations have all systematically and consistently followed to repress and undermine democracy across Latin America in nations both great (Brazil) and small (Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia) as well as those in between (Colombia and Venezuela).

However, the sense of challenge, danger and alarm that the admiral tried to convey comes across all too clearly:

“I feel an incredible sense of urgency,” he said. “This Hemisphere in which we live is under assault. The very democratic principles and values that bind us together are being actively undermined by violent transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) and the PRC and Russia. We are losing our positional advantage in this Hemisphere and immediate action is needed to reverse this trend.”

China is building, has bought or now controls outright 40 major ports across Latin America, the SOUTHCOM commander said. And now, in addition, COVID-19 is wrecking political stability across the continent, the admiral said.

“There is an accelerating spiral of instability gripping the region as the pandemic has increased the region’s fragility. Latin America and the Caribbean have suffered among the highest COVID-19 death rates in the world,” Feller said. “According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), per capita income in Latin America will not recover from the pandemic until 2025.”

To America’s strategic horror, China has launched a $1 billion COVID-19 aid offensive across Latin America to build influence in the region and is already rapidly advancing toward their goal of economic dominance in the region within the next 10 years, the admiral said.

“In 2019, the People’s Republic of China surpassed the United States as the leading trade partner with Brazil, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay and is now the region’s second-largest trading partner behind the United States. From 2002 to 2019, PRC trade with Latin America soared from $17 billion to over $315 billion, with plans to reach $500 billion in trade by 2025,” the admiral said.

China’s economic rise in Africa has been much commented upon and studied in the West. However its parallel rise in trade, business and influence in Latin America has been comparatively ignored. But it is happening. It is real. And it is changing the destiny of a continent.

U.S. imperialism is a fact, which the U.S. Government always denies. However, U.S. President Barack Obama implicitly ‘justified’ it when he told graduating students at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, on 28 May, 2014, “The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation.” That means: every other nation is “dispensable”; only the U.S. is not. He then went into a tirade against Russia and China, and even added: “From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us, and governments seek a greater say in global forums… It will be your generation’s task to respond to this new world.” He was telling these West Point cadets (ever so tactfully) that they would be waging war for the benefit of America’s international corporations, and against “rising middle classes [which] compete with us, and governments [which] seek a greater say in global forums” — and that these graduating cadets would be serving in the U.S. military forces in order to crush such “competitors,” if and when America’s diplomatic corps and CIA are turning out to be insufficient to do the job. U.S. military muscle, he was telling them, is against “rising middle classes [which] compete with us, and governments [which] seek a greater say in global forums” — to block such “rise,” and to prevent those other nations from having “a greater say in global forums.” How much more clearly — though only by way of logical inference from what he was explicitly asserting — could he have admitted that America’s military is for global conquest, against all other nations (the world’s “dispensable” nations), and is NOT for national defense? And how much more hostile could he possibly have been to “rising middle classes” abroad, than to say they “compete with us,” and to tell — to America’s future generals, no less — that it will be their “task to respond,” to them, and to that?

America does most of the entire world’s invasions and coups and sanctions. This has been the case ever since 1945. These invasions, coups, and sanctions, aren’t being done in order to conquer a country that attacked America, but are instead being done purely for conquest — 100% aggressive — though “national defense” is always the main excuse that the U.S. Government gives. Only a single quasi-exception to the falsehood of the “national defense” excuse (i.e., the only instance of that excuse having been partly true) has existed, and it was America’s 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, which country likewise had not invaded America, but Al Qaeda had located its headquarters there and so America conquered Afghanistan’s Government, using the 9/11 attacks as its ‘justification’, and this invasion made things even worse for almost everybody (as usually happens from America’s invasions, coups, and sanctions). U.S. imperialism — like that of other countries — doesn’t benefit anyone except the aristocracy (the super-rich) of the invading, coup-promoting, and/or sanctioning, power. The U.S. Government chose to invade Afghanistan instead of to do a Special-Operations take-out of Al Qaeda’s leadership — the alternative option (targeted specifically and only against Al Qaeda’s leadership). The Special-Operations alternative was extremely difficult to achieve, when it was finally done (by Obama), because it wasn’t even started until years after America had already invaded Afghanistan. (Furthermore, the U.S. Government blamed no Government for the 9/11 attacks — not even Afghanistan’s — except Iran, which certainly didn’t participate in either carrying it out or funding it, or planning it; so, that was yet an additional lie by the U.S. Government. The U.S. had grabbed Iran via a coup in 1953 and then lost Iran in 1979 and aims to get it back, so blames Iran mercilessly. America’s entire response to 9/11 was simply loaded with lies.)

The truth about the invasion of Afghanistan was that the U.S. Government wanted to conquer it, and did so, using the 9/11 attacks as the invasion’s ‘explanation’ (excuse, ‘justification’). In fact, the Taliban there repeatedly tried to surrender, but was rebuffed by the U.S. each time. (As another reviewer of that book put it: “Then we had 9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan and the installation of Karzai in Kabul. The Taliban, that was a loose confederation of local actors, was immediately impressed (terrified) of American air power, had no objection to Karzai (a fellow Pashtun), decided to back the Kabul government and give up their weapons. They had had enough of war, one that was continuing with the Northern Alliance when the U.S. invaded, and wanted to retire to civilian life now that there was a credible central government. Instead, the U.S. targeted all-and-any Taliban.”) But, other than that invasion, America’s many invasions have been 100%, and purely, aggressive — not for national defense, at all, but only for conquest. Global polls show that outside the United States, no country is as much regarded as the biggest threat to peace in the world as the U.S. is. Not only is the U.S. the world’s most aggressive nation, but there is no close second to it — or so is the view that’s held by peoples throughout the world, outside the United States.

Unquestionably, since 1945, “national defense,” in the United States, is simply an excuse for America’s having — and by far — the world’s largest military, in terms of dollars expended, which spending-amount is approximately half of the global total military expenditures for all of the world’s countries. It’s expenditures purely for coercive power, not for anyone’s benefit except for the benefit of the individuals who control firms such as Lockheed Martin (sellers to U.S.-and-allied governments) and ExxonMobil and other U.S. extractive and other firms that can obtain competitive advantages by having the world’s pre-eminent military force backing them up (paid for by U.S. taxpayers’ dollars, not paid for by the aristocrats who benefit from it). A government can buy weapons not only for defense, but for aggression and the threat of aggression, and that’s what keeps the controlling owners of such U.S. firms satisfied — especially since actually no country is even merely threatening to invade the United States. Rationally, the controlling owners of America’s war-weapons firms would be funding the campaigns of politicians who serve them, and they are. That’s the way for them to control their own market, which is mainly the U.S. Government. Before Harry S. Truman became America’s President in 1945, the ‘Defense’ Department was called (far more honestly) the “War Department,” but the change-of-name (to “Defense Department”) was part of (so as to hide) the U.S. Government’s (under Truman) turn away from the intentions of America’s Founders, never to have a standing army, but only military forces that would be called up if and when a foreign invasion is imminent or in progress — which has been virtually never. Ever since World War II ended (and that’s throughout the history of the U.S. Department of ‘Defense’), the U.S. military has been all for empire — exactly the thing that America’s Founders despised and wanted this country never to have. Even U.S. President James Monroe, when he announced the Monroe Doctrine, in 1823, did it not for any American imperialism, but against European nations’ imperialisms, which were threatening to move forces into the Western Hemisphere where their armies and ships might pose a threat, by land and sea, to invade the United States. It was against imperialism — NOT for it (such as America’s aristocrats and their lackeys allege).

Obama’s West Point speech that was just referred-to included the most detailed ‘justification’ of U.S. imperialism yet, and it even stated that America’s Founders’ view against imperialism was wrong, and that their view is supported today only by “self-described realists”:

At least since George Washington served as Commander-in-Chief, there have been those who warned against foreign entanglements that do not touch directly on our security or economic wellbeing. Today, according to self-described realists, conflicts in Syria or Ukraine or the Central African Republic are not ours to solve. And not surprisingly, after costly wars and continuing challenges here at home, that view is shared by many Americans.

A different view from interventionists from the left and right says that we ignore these conflicts at our own peril; that America’s willingness to apply force around the world is the ultimate safeguard against chaos, and America’s failure to act in the face of Syrian brutality or Russian provocations not only violates our conscience, but invites escalating aggression in the future. …

As the Syrian civil war spills across borders, the capacity of battle-hardened extremist groups to come after us only increases.  Regional aggression that goes unchecked — whether in southern Ukraine or the South China Sea, or anywhere else in the world — will ultimately impact our allies and could draw in our military.  We can’t ignore what happens beyond our boundaries.

And beyond these narrow rationales, I believe we have a real stake, an abiding self-interest, in making sure our children and our grandchildren grow up in a world where schoolgirls are not kidnapped and where individuals are not slaughtered because of tribe or faith or political belief.

Whereas Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, sometimes spoke against Obama’s foreign policies, Trump continued almost all of them and intensified many of them. Obama’s Vice President, Joe Biden, actively supported and continues to espouse all of them, and, now, as the U.S. President, has installed into the key foreign-policy posts ardent Obama-Administration proponents of all of those aggressive policies.

So: who controls America’s — the only global — imperialism? (This actually anti-American phenomenon.)

First of all: what does it mean to “control?” To control is, effectively, to own. A stockholder of a company doesn’t need to own all of a firm’s stock in order to control it. If the stockholder owns a controlling interest — which may be a majority of it or else far less, sometimes only a few percent in a widely held corporation — then that corporation must do what that individual wants it to do. A typical example of this is that Jeff Bezos owns only 11.1% of Amazon Corporation but he controls it, and the only way in which he doesn’t is that 88.9% of its corporate dividends are going to other investors in it than himself. Amazon pays no dividends; so, obviously, his 11.1% has been as beneficial to him as if he were owning 100% of the company. Anyway, the question here is who controls U.S. imperialism, and the question of who owns it is vastly less important than is who controls it, regardless even if “owns U.S. imperialism” has any meaning, which it probably doesn’t — and, if it does, its meaning is actually not much. But the meaning of “control” is enormous.

So, this is about identifying the individuals who control America’s imperialism (imperialism that America’s aristocracy and their lackeys deny even exists).

On 10 January 2019, CNBC bannered “American firms rule the $398 billion global arms industry: Here’s a roundup of the world’s top 10 defense contractors, by sales,” and 5 of the top 6 were U.S. firms (Lockheed, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics), and the other firm in the top 6 was a UK’s BAE, which was #4. The 5 American firms together sold $139 billion, or 70%, of the total for the world’s top ten makers of weapons-of-war, by dollar-volume of sales. The UK firm (BAE) in the top 6 sold $23 billion, or 11.5% of the top ten. The trans-European Airbus sold 5.5% of the top ten. France’s Thales sold 4.5% of the top ten. Italy’s Leonardo sold 4.5% of the top ten. Russia’s Almaz-Antey sold 4.5% of the top ten. Collectively, those 10 firms together sold $198 billion of war-weapons. That amount was almost exactly half (50%) of the total dollar-volume of all of the top 100 arms-sellers. So, America’s top 5 sold 35% of the entire world’s weaponry. All of the other firms in the top ten were in U.S. allies, members of NATO, except for Russia; so, 95.5% of that $198 billion was in NATO, America’s anti-Russian military alliance. America has 4.3% of the global population. And, as was previously noted, the U.S. Government pays approximately half of the entire world’s military spending, in order (supposedly) to ‘protect the American people’. Of course, lots of lying needs to be believed by the public in order to make this situation seem acceptable; and, actually, there is so much lying, that the American public respect “the Military” more than any other institution in America except “Small business” (which used to be #2 after “The military,” until 2020, when “Small business” became #1 and “The military became the new #2): more than “The church or organized religion,” or than “The Supreme Court,” or than “Congress,” or than “Organized labor,” or than “Big Business,” or than “The public schools,” or than “Newspapers,” or than “The Presidency,” or than “The medical system,” or than “Banks, or than “Television news,” or than “The police,” or than “The criminal justice system,” or than “Large technology companies,” or than “News on the internet,” or than “Health Maintenance Organizations.” That’s a lot of lying, which caused “The military” to be respected more than any of those others.  It is especially a lot because the military is actually the most corrupt of all of America’s institutions.

These are the companies that profit from invading and defending countries. However, the profits from internal weapons-sales by Russian companies (weapons-sales to the Russian Government itself) go mainly to the Russian Government, since that Government requires by law that it must hold a controlling interest in all of the nation’s arms-producers. (For example, Wikipedia’s article on Almaz-Antey — the only Russia firm in that top ten — says “Owner: Federal Agency for Property Management”.) This is done in order to remove the profit-motive from Russia’s weapons-producing firms, and to give that Government total control over Russia’s foreign arms-sales. In other words: it is done to protect Russia’s national security, and also to prevent its arms-producers from controlling the Government, such as can happen in countries (such as the U.S.) where the motive for private profit can (by means of the “revolving-door” and other types of corruption) control the Government’s foreign policies. Unlike other types of corporations, government contractors derive all or virtually all of their profits from sales to governments — not to “the private sector” — and therefore boost their profits by controlling the Government (by means of “revolving-door” and other types of corruption). Consequently, in many countries (especially the United States), the owners of the biggest government contractors do control the Government. In order to achieve this, they, of course, usually need also to control the news-media (and also universities and other ‘non-profits’ such as think tanks), so that they all can claim (and be believed by their public that) their Government is a “democracy.”

So: here are the top owners of America’s producers of war-weapons:

The #1 firm, Lockheed Martin, will be considered first, then the #2, Boeing, then the #3, Raytheon.

Here are the “Top Lockheed Martin Shareholders”, as reported by Investopedia on 6 January 2021:

Top 3 Institutional Shareholders

Institutional investors hold the majority of Lockheed Martin shares at about 69.4% of total shares outstanding.¹⁰

State Street Corp.

State Street owns 42.2 million shares of Lockheed Martin, representing 15.1% of total shares outstanding, according to the company’s 13F filing as of September 30, 2020.¹¹ State Street manages a broad range of assets for clients, including mutual funds, ETFs and other investments with $3.1 trillion in AUM.¹² The SPDR S&P Kensho Final Frontiers ETF (ROKT), which tracks an index of companies involved in space and deep sea exploration, holds Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin represents 4.4% of the fund’s holdings.¹³

Vanguard Group Inc.

Vanguard Group owns 22.0 million shares of Lockheed Martin, representing 7.9% of total shares outstanding, according to the company’s 13F filing for the period ending September 30, 2020.¹¹ The company is primarily a mutual fund and ETF management company with about $6.2 trillion in global AUM.¹⁴ The Vanguard Industrials ETF (VIS), which tracks a market-cap-weighted index of industrial companies, owns Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin comprises about 2.7% of the fund’s portfolio.¹⁵

BlackRock Inc.

BlackRock owns 17.2 million shares of Lockheed Martin, representing 6.2% of total shares outstanding, according to the company’s 13F filing as of September 30, 2020.¹¹ The company is primarily a mutual fund and ETF management company with approximately $7.8 trillion in AUM.¹⁶ The iShares U.S. Aerospace & Defense ETF (ITA), which tracks a market-cap-weighted index of U.S. airplane and defense equipment manufacturers, assemblers, and distributors, owns Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin is the third-largest holding at about 5.7% of the fund’s portfolio.

Here are the “Top Boeing Shareholders”, as reported by Investopedia on 16 July 2020:

Top 3 Institutional Shareholders

Institutional investors hold the majority of Boeing’s shares at about 62% of total shares outstanding. ⁹

Vanguard Group Inc.

Vanguard Group owns 41.8 million shares of Boeing, representing 7.4% of total shares outstanding, according to the company’s 13F filing for the period ending March 31, 2020.¹⁰ The company is primarily a mutual fund and ETF management company with about $6.2 trillion in global assets under management (AUM).¹¹ The Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (VOO) is one of the company’s largest exchange-traded funds (ETFs) with about $151 billion in AUM. Boeing comprises 0.31% of VOO’s holdings.¹²

BlackRock Inc.

BlackRock owns 33.3 million shares of Boeing, representing 5.9% of total shares outstanding, according to the company’s 13F filing for the period ending March 31, 2020.¹⁰ The company is primarily a mutual fund and ETF management company with approximately $6.47 trillion in AUM.¹³ The iShares Core S&P 500 ETF (IVV) is among one of BlackRock’s largest ETFs with approximately $198 billion in AUM. Boeing comprises 0.36% of IVV’s holdings.¹⁴

Newport Trust Co.

Newport Trust owns 32.7 million shares of Boeing, representing 5.8% of total shares outstanding, according to the company’s 13F filing for the period ending March 31, 2020.¹⁰ Newport Trust, owned by Newport Group Inc., is a private company that provides trustee and independent fiduciary services to leading U.S. companies and institutions, including 25% of the corporations in the Fortune 500.^{15 16} The total value of the company’s portfolio is $24.3 billion. Boeing is among Newport Trust’s top 10 holdings, comprising about 20% of the portfolio’s total value [$4.8 billion], as of March 31, 2020.¹⁷

Here are the “Top 10 Owners of Raytheon Technologies Corp”, as reported by CNN Money, on 20 January 2021:

Stockholder    Stake Shares

owned Total value ($)           Shares

SSgA Funds Management, Inc. [State Street]         8.13%  123,514,657  

The Vanguard Group, Inc.     8.09% 122,794,043   

BlackRock Fund Advisors    4.64% 70,492,612     

Wellington Management Co.  LLP     2.87% 43,629,052     

Capital Research & Management Co.          2.66% 40,390,876     

Dodge & Cox  2.00%            30,322,795     

Capital Research & Management Co.          1.93% 29,296,294     

Geode Capital Management LLC      1.48% 22,419,532     

ClearBridge Investments LLC           1.41% 21,351,034     

Franklin Advisers, Inc.           1.28% 19,441,659     

Investopedia also lists the top individual (direct) investors, but those each are top executives of the given firm, and are “less than 0.01% of all outstanding company shares” for Lockheed, and also for Boeing. So, institutional investors control America’s producers of war-weapons.

So: the individuals who are making the investment decisions that determine which U.S. war-weapons makers will be selling stock at what prices are investment-fund managers, mainly at Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street, but also including Wellington Management, Newport Trust, and other such firms. Each of those funds manages hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars, and the identity of their beneficiary top individual investors is not public information; so, these persons, who control American imperialism, are actually anonymous — hidden from the public (as if this were simply a matter of their personal privacy, instead of their participation in ruling over the global empire). Whether those individuals also own controlling interests in mainstream news-media and/or in think tanks or in funding university professorships, or members of Congress, or any U.S. President, or any cabinet member, is likewise unknown — hidden from the public, in this ‘democracy’.

The original purpose for which corporations were created (which was around the year 1600), was in order to enable such anonymity of beneficiaries and also to prevent those owners from being prosecuted for any mass-murders, mass-negligent-homicides, or other mega-crimes, that their corporations perpetrated either domestically or else abroad (such as Union Carbide’s Bhopal India catastrophe). It serves those purposes superbly well. The investors get the profits but can’t be prosecuted for any mega-crimes that have often produced those profits. It’s called “capitalism,” and it’s simply a way to provide investors with legal immunity for vast harms that corporations do, while prisons fill up with almost only poor individuals, who couldn’t even afford a decent lawyer.

America is the king of capitalism. It has actually emerged as the emperor of capitalism, regardless of what socialism is. (Is socialism what’s in the Nordic countries? Or is it only the dictatorial variety, communism? And is socialism even incompatible with communism? Or, are these terms used only propagandistically, to fool the public?)

During the 1930s, the emperor of capitalism was the German “Reich.” That was the world’s leading imperialist nation. But, today, the United States has taken that throne, as the unchallenged leader of imperialism. The individuals who control it are unknown, but what is known is that they are in America’s wealthiest 0.1%. As-of 2014, the top 0.1% of Americans owned almost as much wealth as the bottom 90% did. Furthermore, scientific studies have proven that only the wealthiest control the U.S. Government — the American people don’t. And, of course, the American people don’t benefit from the imperialism of the Government that rules them. Though the invaded and couped and sanctioned countries suffer vastly more than Americans do from the U.S. regime’s imperialism, Americans do suffer from it, too. But the people who control the country don’t allow them to know this. Like in every dictatorship, there is lots of censorship. All of the billionaires’ operations do it — all of them censor-out what no billionaire wants them to know.

Is being extremely evil a prerequisite to serving in a high position at a mega-investment firm within the empire? The chief marketing organization for the empire’s sellers to the empire is NATO; and it, in turn, has several PR or propaganda operations promoting NATO, chief of which is the Atlantic Council, which is funded not only by member governments but by member firms and their founding families. A reasonable presumption would be that those investors have huge investments that are in the very same mega-investment firms that control America’s ‘defense’ contractors.

NATO — America’s military alliance against the Soviet Union — was allegedly against communism, but when the Soviet Union in 1991 ended its communism, and the Soviet Union broke up, NATO did not end but continued on, secretly, continuing its ‘Cold War’ but now against Russia, and expanded right up to Russia’s borders. Every nation that stays in NATO is complicit with the U.S. It’s an international gangland operation and the biggest threat to world peace. A spade should be called a spade, not an organization to ‘defend’ its member-states, but a gang to expand the U.S. empire even farther than it yet has become. It is inimical to all of the world’s peoples, and should be publicly said to be such.

On 9 May 2014, The Real News Network headlined “Who Makes US Foreign Policy? – Lawrence Wilkerson on Reality Asserts Itself (1/3)”, and presented that 20-minute interview, with one of the U.S. regime’s highest-placed whistleblowers, honestly presents the ugly reality, regarding who controls U.S. imperialism. It’s not a democracy; it’s a one-dollar-one-vote dictatorship over a country where the top 0.1% own more than do all of the bottom 80%. Imperialism is inconsistent with democracy. So: naturally, the global empire is a dictatorship.

(NOTE: That interview with Wilkerson closed with his erroneously saying, about Ukraine, that “President Obama has to this point been very subdued about how he’s dealing with sanctions and responses to Putin in general.” Wilkerson was totally ignorant that the overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 had been a brutal coup, which Obama’s Administration had been laying the plans for ever since 2011, and which even included — but Obama failed to achieve — America’s taking Russia’s largest naval base, which is on Crimea, and turning it into yet another U.S. naval base. Wilkerson had specialized on the Middle East, and retired from the U.S Government in 2005. He didn’t even know about this massacre by Obama’s newly imposed Ukrainian coup-regime, which had occurred just a week prior to that interview with Wilkerson. But at least Wilkerson was totally honest. Honest errors can happen to anyone. His errors were simply based upon his having been too trusting of the U.S. Government. After all: he had been surrounded and deceived by its lies, from the Government and in its ‘news’-media, during his entire period in Government service. Even he had been fooled about Ukraine.)

Such is the image projected by Mike Pompeo’s ranting anti-China attacks or the relentless demonization of Russia sweeping across mainstream media ever day- both nations who have repeatedly called for cooperation and friendship with the USA. If it were simply belligerent words then we could brush off these childish attacks as mere foolish rhetoric, but sadly these words are backed by extraordinarily dangerous action. From escalating military maneuvers on Russia’s border, to belligerent military expansion in China’s backyard, everywhere one looks, we find the same lemming-like commitment to playing a nuclear game of chicken in the hopes of psychologically breaking the Multipolar Alliance.

However, as China’s Ambassador Cui Tiankai recently stated, “China and the USA need to recapture the spirit of cooperation from WWII and join hands to confront our common enemies in the new era.”

I couldn’t agree more.

As the Ambassador invoked the spirit of Lincoln citing the beautiful quote: “the best way to predict the future is to create it”, I think it’s wise to revisit the two opposing global policy options the USA had available to it at the turn of the last century while the Civil War hero William McKinley still presided in the office of the presidency in 1901.

At this crucial moment in world history, it was still undetermined whether America would hold on to its anti-imperial traditions or slip into the trap of a new imperial identity.

Monroe Doctrine or Empire?

As Martin Sieff eloquently laid out in his recent article, President McKinley himself was an peacemaker, anti-imperialist of a higher order than most people realize. McKinley was also a strong supporter of two complementary policies: 1) Internally, he was a defender of Lincoln’s “American system” of protectionism, internal improvements and black suffrage and 2) Externally, he was a defender of the Monroe Doctrine that defined America’s anti-imperial foreign policy since 1823.

The Monroe Doctrine’s architect John Quincy Adams laid out this principle eloquently on July 4, 1821:

“After fifty years the United States has, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations, while asserting and maintaining her own.

That the United States does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.

That by involving itself in the internal affairs of other nations, the United States would destroy its own reason of existence; the fundamental maxims of her policy would become, then, no different than the empire America’s revolution defeated. It would be, then, no longer the ruler of itself, but the dictator of the world.”

America’s march is the march of mind, not of conquest.

Colonial establishments are engines of wrong, and that in the progress of social improvement it will be the duty of the human family to abolish them”.

It was an aging John Quincy Adams whom a young Abraham Lincoln collaborated with in ending the imperial Mexican-American war under Wall Street stooge James Polk in 1846. When Adams died in 1848, Lincoln picked up the torch he left behind as the London-directed “proto deep state” of the 19^th century worked to dissolve the republic from within. The foreign policy conception laid out by Adams ensured that America’s only concern was “staying out of foreign imperial entanglements” as Washington had earlier warned and keeping foreign imperial interests out of the Americas. The idea of projecting power onto the weak or subduing other cultures was anathema to this genuinely American principle.

A major battle which has been intentionally obscured from history books took place in the wake of Lincoln’s murder and the re-ascension of the City of London-backed slave power during the decades after the Union victory of 1865. On the one hand America’s role in the emerging global family of nations was being shaped by followers of Lincoln who wished to usher in an age of win-win cooperation. Such an anti-Darwinian system which Adams called “a community of principle” asserted that each nation had the right to sovereign banking controls over private finance, productive credit emissions tied to internal improvements with a focus on continental (rail/road) development, industrial progress and full spectrum economies. Adherants of this program included Russia’s Sergei Witte and Alexander II, Germany’s Otto von Bismarck, France’s Sadi Carnot, and leading figures within Japan’s Meiji Restoration.

On the other hand, “eastern establishment families” of the USA more loyal to the gods of money, hereditary institutions and the vast international empire of Britain saw America’s destiny tied to an imperial global partnership with the Mother country. These two opposing paradigms within America have defined two opposing views of “progress”, “value”, “self-interest” and “law” which have continued to shape the world over 150 years later.

William Gilpin vs Alfred Mahan: Two Paradigms Clash

A champion of the former traditionally American outlook who rose to the international scene was William Gilpin (1813-1894). Gilpin hailed from a patriotic family of nation builders whose patriarch Thomas Gilpin was a close ally of Benjamin Franklin and leading member of Franklin’s Philosophical Society. William Gilpin was famous for his advocacy of America’s trans continental railway whose construction he proselytized as early as 1845 (it was finally begun by Lincoln during the Civil War and completed in 1869 as I outlined in my previous paper How to Save a Dying Republic [LINK]).

In his thousands of speeches and writings, Gilpin made it known that he understood America’s destiny to be inextricably tied to the ancient civilization of China- not to impose opium as the British and their American lackies were want to do, but to learn from and even emulate!

In 1852, Gilpin stated:

“Salvation must come to America from China, and this consists in the introduction of the “Chinese constitution” viz. the “patriarchal democracy of the Celestial Empire”. The political life of the United States is through European influences, in a state of complete demoralization, and the Chinese Constitution alone contains elements of regeneration. For this reason, a railroad to the Pacific is of such vast importance, since by its means the Chinese trade will be conducted straight across the North American continent. This trade must bring in its train Chinese civilization. All that is usually alleged against China is mere calumny spread purposefully, just like those calumnies which are circulated in Europe about the United States”.

With Lincoln’s 1861 presidential victory, Gilpin became Lincoln’s bodyguard and ensured the president survived his first assassination attempt en route to Washington from Illinois. During the Civil War, Gilpin was made Colorado’s first Governor where he successfully stopped the southern power from opening up a western front during the war of secession (applying Lincoln’s greenback system to finance his army on a state level) and winning the “Battle of Glorieta Pass”, thus saving the union.

After the war Gilpin became a leading advocate of the internationalization of the “American system of political economy” which Lincoln applied vigorously during his short-lived presidency. Citing the success of Lincoln’s system, Gilpin said: “No amount of argument will make America adopt old world theories… To rely upon herself, to develop her own resources, to manufacture everything that can possibly be manufactured within her territory- this is and has been the policy of the USA from the time of Alexander Hamilton to that of Henry Clay and thence to our own days”.

Throughout his speeches Gilpin emphasizes the role of a U.S.-Russia alliance: “It is a simple and plain proposition that Russia and the United States, each having broad, uninhabited areas and limitless undeveloped resources, would by the expenditure of 2 or 3 hundred millions apiece for a highway of the nations threw their now waste places, add a hundredfold to their wealth and power and influence”

And seeing in China’s potential the means to re-enliven the world- including the decadent and corrupt culture of Europe: “In Asia a civilization resting on a basis of remote antiquity has had, indeed, a long pause, but a certain civilization- although hitherto hermetically sealed up has continued to exist. The ancient Asiatic colossus, in a certain sense, needed only to be awakened to new life and European culture finds a basis there on which it can build future reforms.”

In opposition to the outdated British controls of “chock points” on the seas which kept the world under the clutches of the might of London, Gilpin advocated loudly for a system of internal improvements, rail development, and growth of the innate goodness of all cultures and people through scientific and technological progress. Once a global system of mutual development of rail were established, Gilpin stated “in the shipment of many kinds of raw and manufactured goods, it will largely supersede the ocean traffic of Great Britain, in whose hands is now carrying the trade of the world.”

Gilpin’s vision was most clearly laid out in his 1890 magnum opus “The Cosmopolitan Railway” which featured designs for development corridors across all continents united by a “community of principle”.

Echoing the win-win philosophy of Xi Jinping’s New Silk Road today, Gilpin stated:

“The cosmopolitan railway will make the whole world one community. It will reduce the separate nations to families of our great nation… From extended intercommunication will arise a wider intercourse of human ideas and as the result, logical and philosophical reciprocities, which will become the germs for innumerable new developments; for in the track of intercommunication, enterprise and invention invariably follow and whatever facilitates one stimulates every other agency of progress.”

Mahan Derails America’s Anti-Imperial Identity

Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914) represented an opposing paradigm which true American statesmen like Lincoln, Secretary of State James Blaine, William Seward, President Grant, William Garfield, and McKinley detested. Sadly, with McKinley’s murder (run by an anarchist ring with ties to British Intelligence) and the rise of Teddy Roosevelt in 1901, it was not Gilpin’s but rather Mahan’s worldview which became the dominant foreign policy doctrine for the next 120 years (despite a few brief respites under FDR and JFK).

Mahan is commonly credited for being a co-founder of modern geopolitics and an inspiration for Halford Mackinder. Having graduated from West Point’s naval academy in 1859, Mahan soon became renowned as a total failure in actual combat having crashed warships repeatedly into moving and stationary objects during the Civil War. Since reality was not his forte, Mahan focused his post-war career on Ivory tower theorizing gushing over maps of the world and fawning over Britain’s power as a force of world history.

His “Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660-1783 published in the same year that Gilpin published his Cosmopolitan Railway (1890) was a total break from the spirit of win-win cooperation that defined America’s foreign policy. According to the Diplomat, this book soon “became the bible for many navies around the world” with the Kaiser of Germany (now released from the influence of the great rail-loving statesman Otto von Bismarck whom he fired in 1890) demanding all of his offers read. Later Teddy Roosevelt ordered copies for every member of Congress. In Mahan’s book, the geopolitician continuously asserts his belief that it is America’s destiny to succeed the British Empire.

Taking the British imperial definition of “commerce” which uses free trade as a cover for the military dominance of weak nations (open borders and turning off protectionism simply makes a people easier to rob), Mahan attempts to argue that America need not continue to adhere to “outdated” habits like the Monroe doctrine since the new order of world empires demands America stay relevant in a world of sea power and empire. Mahan writes: “The advance of Russia in Asia, in the division of Africa, in the colonial ambitions of France and in the British idea of Imperial Federation, now fast assuming concrete shape in practical combined action in South Africa” demands that the USA act accordingly.

Attempting to refute the “outdated habits” of rail development which consume so many foolish statesmen around the globe, Mahan states: “a railway competes in vain with a river… because more facile and copious, water traffic is for equal distances much cheaper and because cheaper, more useful”. Like those attacking today’s Belt and Road Initiative, the power of railways is that their returns are not measurable by simple monetary terms, but are rather QUALITATIVE. The long-term construction of rail systems not only unite divided people, increase manufacturing and industrial corridors but also induce closer powers of association and interchange between agriculture and urban producers. These processes uplift national productive powers building full spectrum economies and also a culture’s capacity for creative thought.

The attempt made to justify sea traffic merely because “larger amounts of goods can be shipped” is purely quantitative and monetaristic sophistry devoid of any science of real value.

While Gilpin celebrates the successful awakening of China and other great nations of the world, in the Problem of Asia (1901) Mahan says: “It is scarcely desirable that so vast a proportion of mankind as the Chinese constitute should be animated by but one spirit”. Should China “burst her barriers eastward, it would be impossible to exaggerate the momentous issues dependant upon a firm hold of the Hawaiian islands by a great civilized maritime power.”

Mahan’s adherence to social Darwinism is present throughout his works as he defines the political differences of the 3 primary branches of humanity (Teutonic, Slavic and Asiatic) as purely rooted in the intrinsic inferiority or superiority of their race saying: “There are well recognized racial divergencies which find concrete expression in differences equally marked of political institution, of social progress and of individual development. These differences are… deep seated in the racial constitution and partly the result of the environment”. Mahan goes onto restate his belief that unlike the superior Teutonics “the Oriental, whether national or individual does not change” and “the East does not progress”.

Calling China a carcass to be devoured by an American eagle, Mahan writes: “If life departs, a carcass can be utilized only by dissection or for food; the gathering to it of the eagles is a natural law, of which it is bootless to complain… the onward movement of the world has to be accepted as a fact.”

Championing an Anglo American alliance needed to subdue and “civilize” China as part of the post-Boxer Rebellion, Mahan says “of all the nations we shall meet in the East, Great Britain is the one with which we have by far the most in common in the nature of our interests there and in our standards of law and justice”.

In case there was any doubt in the minds of Mahan’s readers as to the MEANS which America should assert its dominance onto China, Mahan makes clear his belief that progress is caused by 1) force and 2) war: “That such a process should be underlain by force… on the part of outside influences, force of opposition among the latter themselves [speaking of the colonial European monarchies racing to carve up China in 1901 -ed] may be regrettable, but it is only a repetition of all history… Every step forward in the march that has opened in China to trade has been gained by pressure; the most important have been the result of actual war.”

A Last Anti-Imperial Push

The chaos induced by the anti-foreigner Boxer Rebellion of 1899 which spread quickly across China resulted a heated battle between imperial and anti-imperial forces in both Russia and the USA. Where Transport Minister Sergei Witte who spearheaded the development of the Trans Siberian rail line (1890-1905) tried to avoid military entanglement, McKinley was busy doing the same.

The boxers soon attacked the Manchurian rail connecting Russia to China by land and Witte succumbed to pressure to finally send in troops. The reformers of China who attempted to modernize with American and Russian assistance under Emperor Kuang Hsu and Li Hung Chang fell from power as total anarchy reigned. The outcome of the Boxer chaos involved the imperial powers of France, Germany and England demanding immense financial reparations, ownership of Chinese territory and mass executions of the Boxers.

While McKinley is often blamed for America’s imperial turn, the reality is just the opposite.

The Spanish-American war begun in 1898 was actually launched unilaterally by Anglophilic racist Theodore Roosevelt who used the 4 hour window he had while Undersecretary of the Navy (while the actual Secretary was out of Washington) to send orders to Captain Dewey of the Pacific fleet to engage in a fight with the Spanish over their Philippine territories. McKinley had resisted the war hawks until that point but found himself finally bending to the momentum. In China, McKinley, like Witte worked desperately to reject taking territory resulting in great fears from the British oligarchy that a U.S.-Russia alliance led by McKinley and Witte was immanent.

The assassination of McKinley on September 18, 1901 catapulted Mahan-loving Vice President Teddy Roosevelt into high office, who enmeshed America into a new epoch of Anglo-American imperialism abroad, a growth of eugenics and segregation at home and the creation of an independent police state agency called the FBI.

As Sieff writes: “Roosevelt devoted his next eight years in the presidency and the rest of his life to integrating the United States and the British Empire into a seamless web of racial imperialist oppression that dominated Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and Asia and that destroyed the cultural history and heritage of the Native North American nations.”

In Russia, the 1902 Anglo-Japan Treaty led to the disastrous Japan-Russo war of 1905 which devastated the Russian navy, ended the political career of Sergei Witte and threw Russia into chaos leading to the fall of the Romanovs (Czar Nicholas II was the last statesman occupying high office that this author is aware of to have actively promoted the Bering Strait Tunnel rail connection in 1906. It wasn’t until FDR’s Vice President Henry Wallace met with Foreign Minister Molotov in 1942 that the idea resurfaced once more).

While the “open door” rape of the China was attempted by the Anglo-Americans, a fortunate rear guard maneuver orchestrated by another follower of Abraham Lincoln named Sun Yat-sen resulted in a surprise overthrow of the Manchu dynasty in 1911 and the institution of the Republic of China with Sun Yat-sen as the acting President. While Sun Yat-sen sided with Gilpin and Lincoln in opposition to the Mahanists on the issue of rail and industrial development (illustrated in his extraordinary 1920 International Development of China program), the intrigues that sank the world into World War I made any hopes of this early development of China impossible in Sun Yat-sen’s lifetime.

Today’s Belt and Road Initiative, and strategic friendship established between Russia and China has re-awoken the forgotten vision of William Gilpin for a world of cooperating sovereign nation states. Does President Trump have the moral and intellectual fortitude to keep his nation from disintegrating long enough to accept a Russia-U.S.-China alliance needed to revive McKinley’s American System or will we slip into a new World War?

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

Trump’s reinvigoration of the 19^th century imperialist Monroe Doctrine, which Washington uses as a political lever to prevent the Western Hemisphere from adopting its own foreign and domestic policies, has, once again, cast the United States in the light of an oppressive overlord over the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean.

The Trump regime has returned to a Cold War playbook of color-coding Western Hemisphere nations with red or pink for “socialist” and “communist.” Falling into the “red” category are Venezuela, which is suffering from crippling US-led economic, diplomatic, and trade sanctions, and Nicaragua and Cuba, which are also subject to sanctions. Color-coded “pink” are Mexico and Argentina, led by progressive presidents and which have shifted from their heretofore pro-US stances. Argentina elected progressive leftist Alberto Fernández as president and, as vice president, former president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. The Peronista left ticket defeated incumbent right-wing president Mauricio Macri, a one-time real estate business crony of Trump and someone who had abused the nation’s security services in a failed attempt to dig up dirt to target former President Kirchner in a bogus corruption court case. The same CIA-backed “lawfare” operation was used to impeach and remove from office Brazilian leftist president Dilma Rousseff and imprison her predecessor, the wildly popular Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Lula, recently freed from prison after his trial and conviction were deemed by the Supreme Court to have been a right-wing ruse, is vowing to challenge neo-Nazi president Jair Bolsonaro in the next presidential election.

Trump and his Central Intelligence Agency’s aggressive stance toward progressive hemispheric governments have seen more transitions from the “red/pink” bloc to the fascistic and pro-US bloc than the other direction. Ecuador has moved from the red/pink bloc to the blue as a result of the pro-US policies of President Lenin Moreno, who served as vice president under the leftist president Rafael Correa from 2007 to 2013. Moreno’s threats against his predecessor forced Correa to flee to political exile in Belgium. The recent right-wing coup in Bolivia was supported by fascist leaders of Brazil and Colombia. Bolivia’s democratically-elected president Evo Morales was forced to flee to Mexico, which granted him political asylum.

The revanchist imperialism of the Trump administration has witnessed Moreno and Morales being forced to flee the fascist “thugocracy” policies of their respective nations, which rely on abusing the legal system to stifle dissent and imprison opposition politicians. The governments of Chile and Peru have also firmly lined up with Washington and have engaged in anti-opposition policies that, in the case of Chile, has led to bloodshed in the streets as a result of brutal police actions.

A recent addition to the blue bloc from the pink/red coalition is Uruguay. After fifteen years of rule by the left-wing Broad Front, the right-wing National Party’s presidential candidate, Luis Lacalle Pou, declared a razor-thin victory over Broad Front candidate Daniel Martinez. One of Lacalle Pou’s first decisions was to recognize the opposition Venezuelan regime of the CIA puppet, Juan Guaido. Lacalle Pou also decided to align Uruguay with the Lima Group, a bloc of US lackey regimes dedicated to overthrowing the Maduro government of Venezuela. Lacalle Pou has also signaled his willingness to develop closer ties with the Bolsonaro regime in Brazil and distance Uruguay from the Fernandez- Kirchner government of Argentina. It is not secret that Argentina’s Alberto Fernández supported the Broad Front’s Daniel Martinez for president.

Of special concern to progressive Uruguayans is the role that Lacalle Pou’s coalition partner, the Cabildo Abierto party of far-right winger Guido Manini Ríos, will play in his government. If the CIA’s lawfare operations in Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, and Bolivia are any indication, the Cabildo Abierto elements in Lacalle Pou’s government, all supporters of the former military junta’s war against leftists in the 1970s, may seek the arrest of former leftist presidents Jose Mujica, a leader of the leftist Tupamaro guerrillas in the 1970s, and Tabaré Vázquez. The Latin American fascist acolytes of Trump, from Bolsonaro and Bolivian politician Luis Fernando Camacho – known as the “Bolivian Bolsonaro” – to Manini Ríos and Colombian President Ivan Duque, all share in common a desire to imprison and even torture and execute the leftist opposition of their respective nations.

If the fascistic foreign policy power levers of the Trump White House, CIA, and State Department have their way, another leftist leader in South America will face prison or worse. Suriname’s leftist president Desi Bouterse was recently convicted by a military court of the extrajudicial executions of 15 political opponents in 1982, while he served as the military leader of the former Dutch colony.

The death of the 15 opposition leaders may have been the work of the CIA, which launched a coup attempt against Bouterse in 1982. In December 1982, the CIA worked closely with Dutch intelligence to establish contacts with Bouterse’s opposition in Suriname, including politicians, businessmen, and journalists. The Dutch provided assistance to former President Henck Chin a Sen and his Amsterdam-based opposition forces. The CIA plan included landing Surinamese rebels in Paramaribo, the Suriname capital, and seize power. There were also reports that the CIA planned to assassinate Bouterse during the coup, a direct violation of a White House executive order banning assassinations of foreign leaders. The CIA’s chief in-country liaison for the coup was US ambassador to Suriname Robert Duemling.

A CIA dispatch from Suriname, dated March 12, 1982, describes the CIA’s hands-on involvement in the coup against Bouterse: “Dissident military officers opposing the leftist trend of the military leadership launched a coup yesterday, but forces loyal to the government are still resisting. The group, calling itself the Army of National Liberation, is led by two officers who have been associated with conservative elements of the Surinamese society . . . Although the rebels have control of the Army’s main barracks and ammunition depot in Paramaribo, government strongman Army Commander Bouterse and troops loyal to him apparently have taken up a defensive position in the capital’s police camp some 6 kilometers away. Fighting subsided somewhat last night, with both sides claiming to be in control and appealing for support from military troops and citizenry. A large number of rank-and-file military, who had objected to Bouterse’s leftist policies several months ago, probably will join the dissidents if Bouterse’s position weakens further.” If anyone is responsible for the deaths of the opposition figures in 1982, one does not need to look beyond CIA headquarters in Langley and its interlocutors with the Ford Foundation in New York.

Suriname’s third largest ethnic group is Javanese, people who originally were settled by the Dutch colonizers from Indonesia. In 1982, Barack Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, who spoke fluent Javanese, was already well-entrenched with CIA programs in Java through her employment with the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Ford Foundation. Dunham, who used her Indonesian last name, re-spelled Sutoro from Soetoro, was a valuable asset for the CIA’s program to destabilize Suriname through its business-oriented and very anti-Bouterse Javanese minority. Curiously, Ann Sutoro’s employment contract with the Ford Foundation ended in December 1982, the same month that the CIA attempted to oust Bouterse. During her 1981-1982 contract with the Ford Foundation, Dunham Sutoro spent much of her time liaising with the Ford Foundation’s headquarters in New York, a city that was also a base for the CIA-backed Surinamese opposition.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Bouterse was on a state visit to China when the court delivered its guilty verdict, along with a 20-year prison sentence. Bouterse seized power in 1980 during an era that saw leftist leaders like Daniel Ortega and his Sandinistas, Panamanian President Omar Torrijos, Ecuadorian President Jaime Roldos, Bolivian President Hernán Siles Zuazo, Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley, and Grenadian Prime Minister Maurice Bishop all buck Washington’s influence in the hemisphere. Bouterse became a destabilization target of the Ronald Reagan-George H. W. Bush administration. After stepping down from power in 1987, Bouterse and his National Democratic Party returned to power when Bouterse was elected president in 2010 and re-elected in 2015. In 2012, the National Assembly passed a bill that granted Bouterse immunity from prosecution. It was later overturned by a court in another blatant display of Washington-orchestrated lawfare. In 1999, the Dutch weighed in against Bouterse by being convicted by a Netherlands court of drug-trafficking. Bouterse denies all the claims against him and remains popular among the primarily Afro-Surinamese population.

The legal action against Bouterse appears to be part of the Trump administration’s program to curb China’s international “Belt and Road Initiative,” particularly in Latin America. Trump has countered with his own contrivance, called the “Growth in the Americas” program. Peru has signaled that it will join Argentina, Chile, Jamaica, and Panama in supporting the American anti-Chinese bloc. It is clear that if Washington is able to depose Bouterse from power in Suriname, it can prevent China from establishing a foothold in the country.

The Trump regime is attempting to move its chess pieces around on the Western hemisphere’s political chessboard. Increasingly, it will be up to exiled progressives like Correa and Morales, as well as the recently-liberated Lula, to counter the march to fascist rule from Tierra del Fuego to the Rio Grande.

A US military intervention in Mexico would mean three very important things for America’s near future.

1) “Fortress America” would be all but confirmed.

It has been rumored for quite some time, that Donald Trump is trying to push forward a type of Monroe Doctrine 2.0 that has been dubbed “Fortress America”. One should note that Trump himself does not use this expression but it gets attributed to him, but with US backed regime change (in one form or another) in Bolivia, Brazil, and a hard push in Venezuela we can definitely see there is a tangible desire to focus on South of the Border. This is in contrast to Ukraine, Syria and the rest of the Middle-East, which are just sort of being left in stasis. Pulling the troops out but keeping hold of the oil in Syria is a perfect example of this.

If it can be revealed that the US is responsible for the uprisings in Chile and willing to attack and reorganize Mexico under some questionable pretence, then it more or less proves this Fortress America concept is more than just a fun term for geopolitical buffs to throw around to feel smart online.

An America that has ambitions only in the Western Hemisphere is going to be much different from the global hegemon that we know today, in fact it may look like the America of yesteryear that the world fell in love with. For the Ron Paul types this could be a major victory via retreat.

2) Amerca would be reasserting the continental dominance that it won in 1846-1848.

Geopolitically the United States has some of the best geography in human history, being very big with fair and diverse climates. The only neighbor to the north (who is culturally similar) has a tiny population, with massive oceans protecting it from any potential invaders. After the War of 1812 the best anyone has ever done was attack Pearl Harbor – oceans are a fantastic defense. However, despite the way things may seem today had Mexico to the south, won the Mexican-American war it would have become the dominant power on the continent. Comparing Post-Cold War America to Mexico seems like a joke but in the late 1840s, when fighting was a matter of man and bayonet both sides were rather equally matched and had the Mexicans simply fought better they could control the entire West Coast and much of the middle of what is today the United States, possibly giving them the titanic geopolitical advantage that America enjoys today.

Trump has stated many times that he fears China above all else but his passion for the Border Wall and immigration control leads one to see that Mexico is probably #2 on his feared enemies list. This desire to intervene could be masking the necessity (from the President’s perspective) to reassert American dominance on the continent and repeat the triumph of 1848 that is part of the reason the US became a great power.

A newly broken and humiliated by war Mexico will not be able to achieve “Reconquista” through birth rate.

3) The public reaction to fighting near home would be radically different and probably much more impassioned.

Because there are so many Mexicans and Spanish-speakers in the United States bombing south of the border will have a much different social aspect than murdering unintelligible sand people and sub-Europeans. The “victims” of an intervention will have a much louder voice than normal and could actually cause mass protests. It is hard to say just what will happen but attacking Mexico would create a violent blowback all across the United States and have a much different character than the usual “foreign wars” fought in far off lands that no one can find on a map.

Will Trump pull the trigger?

Although this possible intervention sounds alarming, so far Trump has been very reserved in the use of direct force when compared to his predecessors. This would make it seem out of character for him to all of a sudden break his streak and start bombing our neighbors. But this could be a question of value, Trump sees little importance in Syria and probably none in Ukraine, Mexico is a different issue and may cause The President to act more aggressively.

If for some reason Trump were convinced that doom was nigh, then taking action in Mexico would definitely change the trajectory of American history.

Because there is a presidential election coming up next year, the Donald Trump Administration appears to be looking for a country that it can attack and destroy in order to prove its toughness and willingness to go all the way in support of alleged American interests. It is a version of the old neocon doctrine attributed to Michael Ledeen, the belief that every once in a while, it is necessary to pick out some crappy little country and throw it against the wall just to demonstrate that the United States means business.

“Meaning business” is a tactic whereby the adversary surrenders immediately in fear of the possible consequences, but there are a couple of problems with that thinking. The first is that an opponent who can resist will sometimes balk and create a continuing problem for the United States, which has a demonstrated inability to start and end wars in any coherent fashion.

This tendency to get caught in a quagmire in a situation that might have been resolved through diplomacy has been exacerbated by the current White House’s negotiating style, which is to both demand and expect submission on all points even before discussions begin. That was clearly the perception with North Korea, where National Security Advisor John Bolton insisted that Pyongyang had agreed to American demands over its nuclear program even though it hadn’t and would have been foolish to do so for fear of being treated down the road like Libya, which denuclearized but then was attacked and destroyed seven years later. The Bolton mis-perception, which was apparently bought into by Trump, led to a complete unraveling of what might actually have been accomplished if the negotiations had been serious and open to reasonable compromise right from the beginning.

Trump’s written demand that Kim Jong Un immediately hand over his nuclear weapons and all bomb making material was a non-starter based on White House misunderstandings rooted in its disdain for compromise. The summit meeting with Trump, held in Hanoi at the end of February, was abruptly canceled by Kim and Pyongyang subsequently accused Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo of making “gangster-like” demands.

The second problem is that there are only a few actual casus belli situations under international law that permit a country to attack another preemptively, and they are usually limited to actual imminent threats. The current situation with Venezuela is similar to that with North Korea in that Washington is operating on the presumption that it has a right to intervene and bring about regime change, using military force if necessary, because of its presumed leadership role in global security, not because Caracas or even Pyongyang necessarily is threatening anyone. That presumption that American “exceptionalism” provides authorization to intervene in other countries using economic weapons backed up by a military option that is “on the table” is a viewpoint that is not accepted by the rest of the world.

In the case of Venezuela, where Trump has dangerously demanded that Russia withdraw the hundred or so advisors that it sent to help stabilize the country, the supposition that the United States has exclusive extra-territorial rights is largely based on nineteenth and early twentieth century unilaterally declared “doctrines.” The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 and the Roosevelt Corollary of 1904 de facto established the United States as the hegemon-presumptive for the entire Western Hemisphere, stretching from the Arctic Circle in the north to Patagonia in the south.

John Bolton has been the leader in promoting the Monroe Doctrine as justification for Washington’s interference in Venezuela’s politics, apparently only dimly aware that the Doctrine, which opposed any attempts by European powers to establish new colonies in the Western Hemisphere, was only in effect for twenty-two years when the United States itself annexed Texas and then went to war with Mexico in the following year. The Mexican war led to the annexation of territory that subsequently became the states of California, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Arizona and Colorado. In the same year, the United States threatened war with Britain over the Oregon Territory, eventually accepting a border settlement running along the 49^th parallel.

Meanwhile the march westward across the plains continued, forcing the Indian tribes back into ever smaller spaces of open land. The US government in the nineteenth century recognized some Indian tribes as “nations” but it apparently did not believe that they enjoyed any explicit “Monroe Doctrine” rights to continue to exist outside reservations when confronted by the “manifest destiny” proponents who were hell bent on creating a United States that would run from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.

The Roosevelt Corollary of 1904 amended the Monroe Doctrine, making it clear that the United States believed it had a right to interfere in any country in the western Hemisphere to maintain good order, which inevitably led to exploitation of Latin American nations by US business conglomerates that could count on a little help from US Marines if their trade agreements were threatened. In 1898, Washington became explicitly imperialist when it defeated Spain and acquired effective control over Cuba, a number of Caribbean Islands and the Philippines. This led to a series of more than thirty interventions by the US military in the Caribbean and Central America between 1898 and 1934. Other states in the region that were not directly controlled by Washington were frequently managed through arrangements with local autocrats, who were often themselves generals.

Make no mistake, citing the Monroe Doctrine is little more than a plausible excuse to get rid of the Venezuelan government, which is legitimate, like it or not. The recent electrical blackouts in the country are only the visible signs of an aggressive campaign to destroy the Venezuelan economy. The United States is engaging in economic warfare against Caracas, just as it is doing against Tehran, and it is past time that it should be challenged by the international community over its behavior. Guns may not be firing but covert cyberwarfare is total warfare nevertheless, intended to starve people and increase their suffering in order to bring about economic collapse and take down a government to change it into something more amenable to American interests.

South and Central American countries blossomed under the reign of socialist or leftist anti-imperialist governments for the first decade of this century. Such terms as “21st-century socialism” were coined, as was documented in the 2010 Oliver Stone documentary film South of the Border. The list of countries with leftist governments was impressive: Fernando Lugo (Paraguay), Evo Morales (Bolivia), Lula da Silva (Brazil), Rafael Correa (Ecuador), Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (Argentina), Fidel Castro (Cuba), Daniel Ortega (Nicaragua) and Hugo Chávez (Venezuela).

We can establish a close correlation between Washington’s actions since 1989 and the political roller-coaster experienced in South America in the ensuing thirty years.

Washington, drunk on the experience of being the only superpower in the post-Soviet period, sought to lock in her commanding position through the establishment of full-spectrum dominance, a strategy that entails being able to deal with any event in any area of ​​the globe, treating the world as Washington’s oyster.

Washington’s endeavor to shape the world in her own image and likeness meant in practical terms the military apparatus increasing its power projection through carrier battle groups and a global missile defense, advancing towards the land and sea borders of Russia and China.

Taking advantage of the US dollar’s dominance in the economic, financial and commercial arenas, Washington cast aside the principles of the free market, leaving other countries to contend with an unfair playing field.

As later revealed by Edward Snowden, Washington exploited her technological dominance to establish a pervasive surveillance system. Guided by the principle of American exceptionalism, combined with a desire to “export democracy”, “human rights” became an enabling justification to intervene in and bomb dozens of countries over three decades, aided and abetted by a compliant and controlled media dominated by the intelligence and military apparatuses.

Central and South America enjoyed an unprecedented political space in the early 2000s as a result of Washington focusing on Russia, China, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Georgia and Ukraine. The Latin Americans exploited this breathing space, with a dozen countries becoming outposts of anti-imperialism within a decade, advancing a strong socialist vision in opposition to free-market fundamentalism.

Both Washington and Moscow placed central importance on South America during the Cold War, which was part of the asymmetric and hybrid war that the two superpowers undertook against each other. The determination by the United States to deny the Soviet Union a presence in the American hemisphere had the world holding its collective breath during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

As any student of international relations knows, the first objective of a regional power is to prevent the emergence of another hegemon in any other part of the world. The reason behind this is to obviate the possibility that the new power may venture into other regions occupied by other hegemonic powers, thereby upsetting the status quo. The second primary objective is to prevent access by a foreign power to its own hemisphere. Washington abides by this principle through its Monroe Doctrine, set forth by President James Monroe, with the United States duly expelling the last European powers from the Americas in the early 19th century.

In analyzing the events in South America, one cannot ignore an obvious trend by Washington. While the United States was intent on expanding its empire around the world by consolidating more than 800 military bases in dozens of countries (numbering about 70), South America was experiencing a political rebirth, positioning itself at the opposite end of the spectrum from Washington, favoring socialism over capitalism and reclaiming the ancient anti-imperialist ideals of Simon Bolivar, a South American hero of the late 18th century.

Washington remained uncaring and indifferent to the political changes of South America, focusing instead on dominating the Middle East through bombs and wars. In Asia, the Chinese economy grew at an impressive rate, becoming the factory of the world. The Russian Federation, from the election of Putin in 2000, gradually returned to being a military power that commanded respect. And with the rise of Iran, destined to be the new regional power in the Middle East thanks to the unsuccessful US intervention in Iraq in 2003, Washington began to dig her own grave without even realizing it.

Meanwhile, South America united under the idea of a common market and a socialist ideology. The Mercosur organization was founded in 1991 by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. But it was only when Venezuela, led by Chavez, became an associate member in 2004 that the organization assumed a very specific political tone, standing almost in direct opposition to Washington’s free-market template.

Meanwhile, China and Russia continued their political, military and economic growth, focusing with particular attention on South America and the vast possibilities of economic integration from 2010. Frequent meetings were held between Russia and China and various South American leaders, culminating in the creation of the BRICS organization (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). Brazil, first with Lula and then with Dilma Rousseff, was the unofficial spokesperson for the whole of South America, aligning the continent with the emerging Eurasian powers. It is during these years, from the birth of the BRICS organization (2008/2009), that the world began a profound transformation flowing from Washington’s progressive military decline, consumed as it was by endless wars that ended up eroding Washington's status as a world power. These wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have deeply undermined US military prestige, opening unprecedented opportunities for alliances and future changes to the global order, especially with the rise of Iran’s influence in the region as a counterweight to US imperialism.

China, Russia and the South American continent were certainly among the first to understand the potential of this political and historical period; we can recall meetings between Putin and Chavez, or the presence of Chinese leaders at numerous events in South America. Beijing has always offered high-level economic assistance through important trade agreements, while Moscow has sold a lot of advanced military hardware to Venezuela and other South American countries.

Economic and military assistance are the real bargaining chips Moscow and Beijing offer to countries willing to transition to the multipolar revolution while having their backs covered at the same time.

The transformation of the world order from a unipolar to a multipolar system became a fact in 2014 with the return of Crimea to the Russian Federation following the NATO coup in Ukraine. The inability for the US to prevent this fundamental strategic defeat for Brussels and Washington marked the beginning of the end for the Pentagon still clinging on to a world order that disappeared in 1991.

As the multipolar mutation developed, Washington changed tactics, with Obama offering a different war strategy to the one advanced during the George W. Bush presidency. Projecting power around the globe with bombs, carrier battle groups and boots on the ground was no longer viable, with domestic populations being in no mood for any further major wars.

The use of soft power has always been part of the US toolkit for influencing events in other countries; but given the windfall of the unipolar moment, soft power was set aside in favor of hard power. However, following the failures of explicit hard power from 1990 to 2010, soft power was back in favor, and organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the International Republican Institute (IRI) set about training and financing organizations in dozens of hostile countries to subvert governments by underhanded means (colour revolutions, the Arab Spring, etc.).

Among those on the receiving end of this soft-power onslaught were the South American countries deemed hostile to Washington, already under capitalist-imperialist pressure for a number of years in the form of sanctions.

It is during this time that South America suffered a side effect of the new multipolar world order. The United States started retreating home after losing influence around the globe. This effectively meant focusing once again on its own backyard: Central and South America.

Covert efforts to subvert governments with socialist ideas in the hemisphere increased. First, Kirchner's Argentina saw the country pass into the hands of the neoliberal Macri, a friend of Washington. Then Dilma Rousseff was expelled as President of Brazil through the unlawful maneuvers of her own parliament, following which Lula was imprisoned, allowing for Bolsonaro, a fan of Washington, to win the presidential election.

In Ecuador, Lenin Moreno, the successor of Correa, betrayed his party and his people by being a cheerleader for the Pentagon, even protesting the asylum granted to Assange in Ecuador’s embassy in London. In Venezuela following Chavez's suspicious death, Maduro was immediately targeted by the US establishment as the most prominent representative of an anti-imperialist and anti-American Chavismo. The increase in sanctions and the seizure of assets further worsened the situation in Venezuela, leading to the disaster we are seeing today.

South America finds itself in a peculiar position as a result of the world becoming more multipolar. The rest of the world now has more room to maneuver and greater independence from Washington as a result of the military and economic umbrella offered by Moscow and Beijing respectively.

But for geographic and logistical reasons, it is more difficult for China and Russia to extend the same guarantees and protections to South America as they do in Asia, the Middle East and Europe. We can nevertheless see how Beijing offers an indispensable lifeline to Caracas and other South American countries like Nicaragua and Haiti in order to enable them to withstand Washington's immense economic pressure.

Beijing’s strategy aims to limit the damage Washington can inflict on the South American continent through Beijing’s economic power, without forgetting the numerous Chinese interests in the region, above all the new canal between the Atlantic and the Pacific that runs through Nicaragua (it is no coincidence that the country bears the banner of anti-imperialist socialism) that will be integrated into the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Moscow’s objective is more limited but just as refined and dangerous to Washington’s hegemony. A glimpse of Moscow's asymmetrical military power was given when two Russian strategic bombers flew to Venezuela less than four months ago, sending an unmistakable signal to Washington. Moscow has the allies and the technical and military capacity to create an air base with nuclear bombers not all that far away from the coast of Florida.

Moscow and Beijing do not intend to allow Washington to mount an eventual armed intervention in Venezuela, which would open the gates of hell for the continent. Moscow and Beijing have few interlocutors left on the continent because of the political positions of several countries like Argentina, Brazil and Colombia, which far prefer an alliance with Washington over one with Moscow or Beijing. We can here see the tendency of the Trump administration to successfully combine its “America First” policy with the economic and military enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine, simultaneously pleasing his base and the hawks in his administration.

Leaving aside a possible strategy (Trump tends to improvise), it seems that Trump’s domestic political battle against the Democrats, declared lovers of socialism (naturally not as strident as the original Soviet or Chavist kind), has combined with a foreign-policy battle against South American countries that have embraced socialism.

The contribution from China and Russia to the survival of the South American continent is limited in comparison to what they have been able to do in countries like Syria, not to mention the deterrence created by Russia in Ukraine in defending the Donbass or with China vis-a-vis North Korea.

The multipolar revolution that is changing the world in which we live in will determine the rest of the century. One of the final battles is being played out in South America, in Venezuela, and its people and the Chavist revolution are at the center of the geopolitical chessboard, as is Syria in the Middle East, Donbass in Central Europe, Iran in the Persian Gulf, and the DPRK in Asia. These countries are at the center of the shift from a unipolar to a multipolar world order, and the success of this shift will be seen if these countries are able to resist US imperialism as a result of Moscow and Beijing respectively offering military help and deterrence and economic survival and alternatives.

Russia and China have all the necessary means to place limits on the United States, protecting the world from a possible thermonuclear war and progressively offering an economic, social and diplomatic umbrella to those countries that want to move away from Washington and enjoy the benefits of living in a multipolar reality, advancing their interests based on their needs and desires and favoring sovereignty and national interest over bending over to please Washington.

The United States has in the last three decades brought chaos and destruction to large parts of Europe, in spite of the common myth that the old continent has basked in the post-WWII peace of the American-led world order. This falsehood is fueled by European politicians devoted to the European Union and eager to justify and praise the European project. But history shows that the United States fueled or directed devastating wars on the European continent in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, with the conflict between Georgia and Ossetia at the beginning of the 1990s, with the war in Georgia in 2008, and in the coup in Ukraine in 2014, with the ensuing aggression against the Donbass.

The major problem for Washington's European allies has always been summoning the will to contain US imperialism. For many years, especially since the end of the Cold War, European countries have preferred to defer to Washington's positions, confirming their status as colonies rather than allies. It is fundamental to recognize that European politicians have always been at the service of Washington, eager to prostrate themselves to American exceptionalism, favoring US interests over European ones.

The wars on the European continent are a clear demonstration of how Washington used Europe to advance her own interests. The abiding goal of the neocons and the Washington establishment has been to deny any possibility of a rapprochement between Germany and Russia, something that could potentially result in a dangerous axis threatening Washington's interests. The war of aggression against Yugoslavia represented the deathblow to the Soviet republics, an effort to banish the influence of Moscow on the continent. The subsequent war in Ossetia, Georgia and Ukraine had the double objective of attacking and weakening the Russian Federation as well as creating a hostile climate for Moscow in Europe, limiting economic and diplomatic contacts between East and West.

In recent years, especially following the coup in Ukraine, the return of Crimea to the Russian Federation, and Kiev’s terrorist action against the Donbass, relations between Russia and the West have deteriorated to historically low levels.

The election of Trump has sent confusing signals to the Europeans vis-a-vis Russia. Initially Trump seemed intent on establishing good relations with Putin in the face of strong opposition from European allies like France, Germany and the UK. But the possibility of a US-Russia rapprochement has been severely undermined by a combination of Trump’s inexperience, the unhelpful advisors he has appointed, and the US deep state. This geopolitical upheaval has had two primary consequences. For the Germans, first and foremost, it has deepened energy and economic cooperation with Moscow, especially in relation to the Nord Stream 2. But on the other hand, Trump has found friends in European countries hostile to Russia like Poland.

The divergences between the US and Europe have widened with Washington’s withdrawal from a number of important treaties like the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty) and Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), or the Iran nuclear deal, both of which have a direct impact on Europe in terms of security and the economy. Donald Trump and his “America First” attitude has thereby afforded Europeans some space to maneuver and establish some level of autonomy, resulting in increasing synergies with Moscow and especially Beijing.

In economic terms, China has offered Europe (with Greece as a prime example) full integration into the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a project with vast possibilities for increasing trade among dozens of countries. Europe will become the main market for Chinese goods, but at the moment one of the greatest obstacles to be overcome can be seen in the freight trains, which often start their journey towards Europe full but are half-empty on their return journey to China. Beijing and the major European capitals are well aware that to make the BRI project economically sustainable, this exchange must go in both directions so that both sides gain.

The technological interconnection between China and Europe is already happening thanks to Huawei devices that are being purchased by European companies in increasing numbers. The absence of back doors in Huawei systems, in contrast to what Snowden has shown with other Western systems, is the real reason why Washington has declared war on this Chinese company. Industrial espionage is a priceless advantage enjoyed by the United States, and the presence of backdoors on Western systems, to which the CIA and NSA have access, guarantees a competitive advantage allowing Washington to excel in terms of technology. With the spread of Huawei systems this advantage is lost, to the chagrin of Washington's spy apparatus. European allies understand the potential advantage to be gained and are protecting themselves with the Chinese systems.

In technological terms, Beijing's efforts are proving very successful in Europe and are paving the way for future physical integration in the BRI. In this sense, the participation of such European countries as the UK, France, Germany and Italy in the Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) also shows how the prospect of Chinese capital investments are of great interest to troubled European economies.

In the military field, the US withdrawal from the INF Treaty threatens the safety of European countries because of the measures adopted by the Russian Federation to guarantee necessary protection from US systems deployed in Europe. A proverb states that when elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers. Europe, as the potential battlefield in any great-power confrontation, has the most to lose from a renewed cold war that could turn hot. Moscow’s revelation of its new generation of weapons has caused anxiety among Europeans who worry that their lives may be sacrificed in order to please Americans who are thousands of miles away. At the same time, the Americans want to get rid of NATO while demanding that the Europeans spend more on American weapons and also limit Sino-Russian investments in Europe. It is likely that the breakdown of the INF Treaty, combined with the conventional and nuclear capabilities of Moscow, will boost diplomatic talks between Russia and Europe without the US being able to sabotage future agreements. Some European countries are keen to be rid of the policy of subordinating their interests to that of Washington, especially with regards to security.

Russia cleverly uses two decisive instruments to limit Washington's influence on Europe and contain the chaos produced by its foreign-policy establishment. Firstly, it has the strength of its own conventional and nuclear arsenal that acts as a deterrent against excessive provocations. Secondly, it has huge deposits of oil and LNG that it exports to the European market in considerable quantities. The combination of these two factors allows Moscow to contain the chaos unleashed by the US in such places as Georgia or Ukraine as well as limit US influence on internal European affairs, as can be seen in the case of Germany and the Nord Stream 2 project. Merkel is forced to concede that in spite of her demonisation of Moscow, Berlin cannot do away with Russia’s supply of energy. This has increased tensions between Berlin and Washington, with the US eager to replace Russian gas with its own much more expensive LNG shipped all the way across the Atlantic.

Chinese economic power, combined with Russia’s military deterrence as well as European reliance on Russia for its energy supply, shows that Europe cannot afford to follow its American ally in acting provocatively against the Sino-Russian axis. Europe has, moreover, suffered from US wars in the Middle East and the waves of migrants brought on by this. Small shoots of strategic autonomy can be seen in the creation of the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (INSTEX), an alternative payment system to the dollar to work around sanctions against Iran. The little or no diplomatic support extended to Ukraine’s anti-Russia stance by France and Germany could be seen as another sign of the Europeans becoming more independent. The recent Munich Security Conference, with Poroshenko in attendance, further confirmed that Merkel intends to rely on Russian gas supplies in the interests of energy diversification.

The combined diplomatic, military and economic actions of Russia and China in Europe are decidedly more limited and effective in Europe compared to other parts of the world like the Middle East and Asia. Political rhetoric, amplified by the media, that is against cooperation between Europe, Russia and China, only serves the interests of the United States. Russia and China are succeeding by proposing viable alternatives to Washington’s unipolar world order, extending to European countries a strategic liberty that would otherwise not be available to them in a Washington-directed unipolar world order.

It is still not clear whether the European capitals are turning to Moscow out of anti-Trump rather than anti-American sentiment. It remains to be seen whether these changes are temporary and await the return to the US presidency of someone who believes in liberal hegemony, or whether the changes underway are the first in a series of upheavals that will progressively reshape the world order from unipolar to multipolar, with Europe clearly being one of the main poles.